Big Girl took this beautiful photo of Tambo, her favourite cat. She’s very affectionate and loves Big Girl; at night she mews until she’s allowed to go into Big Girl’s room and sleep on her bed.
I’m really enjoying the June 2010 photo challenge – one black and white photo a day. I’m way behind (but they also announced it pretty late) but I’m plugging away anyway. I love black and white, so this challenge suits me perfectly.
The next four weeks of the overall 2010 challenge is all about colour theory. I’ll need to work a lot harder at that than I do at black and white.
Big Girl’s kids party was on today. She spent so much time running around I didn’t actually get any decent photos of her! Baby sister was a lot quieter.
My friend Scott Smith is putting together an awesome mini photo project right now. For the next 50 days, he’s committed to taking at least one shot a day with his 50mm lens. The video of the first week is up on his blog; check it out. It rocks.
I took the day off work today (considering it marks the end of my 43rd year on the planet) so the Kids and I over to Castlemaine to have lunch with my parents. We also dovetailed in a visit to two of the gold mining heritage areas that are in nearby Chewton.
The first was the Forest Creek Gold Diggings. This is a walking trail around a few hectares of bush that still has lots of remnants of gold processing machinery. There were a few interesting things to see there. We only saw one piece of casting that had its origin embossed on it, and that was from the Sirocco company in Belfast, Ireland.
After lunch we went over to the site of the Garfield Water Wheel. I have to admit that I’d never even heard of this until Mum showed me an old photo of it a week or two back. The wheel itself is long gone, but the stone foundations that it stood on are still there. They are huge.
You can see from the curved markings on the inside of the right support just how large this thing was. It was 70 feet in diameter – around 22 meters – and when it was operating it could be heard from Castlemaine, which is almost 10km away. The wheel was fed from an overhead wooden flume and was used to run a series of stamps that crushed the ore.
The kids had a great day with their grandparents, and we all enjoyed wandering around the gold diggings. As Mum commented, it’s just so peaceful being out in the bush. At the site of the water wheel you can’t hear anything except a bit of wind in the trees and lots and lots of birds.
I’ve got a more extensive photo set up on flickr.
Who said what?